Chinese President Xi Jinping is getting the United States he always wanted. Since U.S. President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, Washington has grown less confident in its global purpose, less committed to the rules-based order it once upheld, and more willing to wield power in ways that unsettle markets, institutions, and allies. Washington’s global authority and credibility are wearing away.

In one sense, this is good news for Beijing. A weaker, less moralistic Washington is harder for others to rally around. It offers a less compelling model. It has become less capable of organizing coalitions and more likely to drive away the very partners it needs to balance China. For decades, Chinese leaders have wanted a United States strong enough to keep the global economy afloat and prevent outright systemic collapse but no longer capable of shaping the international order in ways that constrain China’s rise. Xi is now closer to that outcome than any emperor or party leader of the past two centuries.

Yet this is not an unambiguous victory for China. Xi does not want simply a diminished United States. He wants one that still helps to preserve a stable world order. That distinction is easy to miss in Washington, where analysts often assume that geopolitical competition works like a running scoreboard: if the United States loses, China must win, and vice versa. But Beijing does not interpret every U.S. setback as a Chinese gain, and Chinese leaders do not assume that every geopolitical opening must be exploited.

More often, they wait, watch, and calculate their next move. They ask not simply whether the United States has been weakened but whether the surrounding environment has become more stable or more chaotic. Beijing cares whether trade continues to flow, whether energy arrives on time, and whether global crises remain bounded rather than cascade. For China, stability is not a soft preference. It is the precondition for continued national strengthening.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, which has spiraled into a regional conflagration, is the most consequential test yet of China’s strategic restraint. Unlike Russia’s war in Ukraine, the war in Iran threatens China’s core strategic interests—not because of acute dependence on Middle Eastern hydrocarbons but because an increasingly volatile Washington is destabilizing the global order on which Beijing depends.

The danger for China lies not in immediate scarcity but in disorder. A United States that is simply weaker is manageable; one that is unpredictable, violent, and unconstrained by the system it once championed is far more perilous. A fading United States may create opportunity; a volatile America destroys the very conditions that allow those opportunities to materialize. What Beijing fears is not that Washington will lose power but that it will wield its remaining power in ways that make the world harder to navigate. Confronted with an increasingly reckless Washington, the Chinese leadership will act with caution, protect its vulnerabilities, and resist taking up global responsibilities that it is ill equipped to shoulder.

China’s muted response to the war in Iran—diplomatic engagement, calls for a cease-fire, and avoidance of direct military involvement—reflects not indifference or opportunistic gain-seeking. It is a deliberate effort to manage systemic risk, preserve the external conditions necessary for trade and capital flow, and safeguard the foundations of China’s long-term ascent. China’s challenge, therefore, is not merely to rise within the global system but to survive its unraveling. In a world shaped increasingly by disruption rather than design, the greatest threat to China’s ambitions may not be American strength but American instability.

Since reopening itself to the rest of the world in 1979, China has accumulated wealth and power within an international system built and sustained by the United States. Beijing exploited that order, pushed against it, and built alternatives around........

© Foreign Affairs